Making headlines!

I love the fact people are picking up on the issue, but I get a twinge of irritation whenever I read "Things went south when the developer changed the iPad game so that players had to spend actual money in order to finish it for $3.99 or more."

If I was reading this blind, I'd think '3.99....meh....hardly the end of the world nor particularly newsworthy'.

What WOULD spark my interest would be the truth....

One of the many quests in the game, to banish monsters, costs nearly $500 worth of diamonds. That's more than a new Playstation 3 and a large pile of PS3 games!!

SJ wrote:I love the fact people are picking up on the issue, but I get a twinge of irritation whenever I read "Things went south when the developer changed the iPad game so that players had to spend actual money in order to finish it for $3.99 or more."

If I was reading this blind, I'd think '3.99....meh....hardly the end of the world nor particularly newsworthy'.

What WOULD spark my interest would be the truth....

One of the many quests in the game, to banish monsters, costs nearly $500 worth of diamonds. That's more than a new Playstation 3 and a large pile of PS3 games!!

SJ we have written to the authors of the articles and the venturebeat one has been updated. We are trying to keep the info accurate.

I just wanted to share a letter someone sent to the author of the venturebeat.com article. Since they are from this forum I thought it relevant to this thread.

"Here's a long message I got from a player, trying to explain what happened and what the sequence of events was. The message follows:

I'd

say that most people complaining are level 100 and higher, meaning

that even if they had added zero friends in exchange for diamonds,

they've had at least 500 diamonds at their disposal since you get 5

for each level advanced. Not to mention that GI has given away

probably hundreds of diamonds for simple things like entering weekend

codes that they give out on the Facebook page, rating the app at the

App Store, and downloading their other games. Out of those ~700+

diamonds I've had, I probably have used fewer than 200 to skip past

parts of the game that got frustrating. (Usually it involves waiting

for a certain item to appear under particular circumstances. It *will*

eventually appear, but some people don't want to wait at all and will

just buy the item with their diamonds right away.) Others have been

spent on things that definitely aren't needed to advance in the game,

like permanently boosting my maximum energy, or changing the

appearance of your username.

I can't speak for the other communities, but the main thing that fired

up the mmuff.com group is that in the last month, GI started banning

people who abused glitches in order to advance in the game -- at least

a handful of posters at mmuff.com got banned. The way the game was

supposed to work is that you can give other players collection items

out of your own inventory. Like most objects in the world, when you

give Item X to a player, the amount of X that the receiver has goes up

by 1, and the amount you have goes down by 1. Well, a glitch was

discovered so that if you gave away an item, but hit the "Cancel"

button within a split second, the other player would still get the

item, and you wouldn't lose yours. It was really easy to do. So not

only could you for all intents and purposes "create" items out of thin

air to give away without losing your own, this also got around the

limit of 10 items you could give each day. People went nuts with it to

the point where the most avid were literally -- yes, literally --

giving away hundreds of items to their friends every day. Of course,

GI was going to notice this and respond.

So they did, and some people got banned. This naturally gave most of

the mmuff.com community the vapors. And then the unthinkable happened:

GI fixed the gifting glitch entirely. Note that the game doesn't force

you to upgrade right away, you're just limited to trading gifts with

people who are using the same version of the game as you. So of course

when word got out, a lot of the most avid gifters declined to upgrade,

so that they could continue to use the glitch. Now you can tell who

has upgraded and who hasn't, because you're only allowed to visit the

rooms of people using the same version of you. And wouldn't you know

it, but about a week after the upgrade had been released, a good

percentage of the leaderboard was taken by people who hadn't upgraded

their games. So GI eventually forced everyone to upgrade by basically

not letting non-upgraders do anything meaningful in the game, and now

everybody is on the current version of the game, multi-gifting is

dead, and that's when it really hit the fan.

Note that there are some legit complaints out there. I've suffered

probably 3 crashes at most the past few months, but I believe the

people who say it's a problem for them. I'm guessing it's because I'm

using an iPad 3, and they might be on less powerful iPads which might

be causing the problems. The coins in the game (as opposed to the

diamonds) are basically useless. Being a social game, not being able

to add particular friends (whether you got diamonds for doing so or

not) is a large problem. There are certain "creatures" in the game

(Ninjas) that drop items needed to explore a certain room in the game,

but they have all but disappeared for some reason. (I doubt it was

done on purpose, they just need to rebalance the game.) The current

version often hangs for seconds on end when sending a gift that

someone requested on your wall. But there have occasionally been

problems like the hanging issue and GI has gotten them ironed out in

subsequent updates. Speaking of GI's support, while I wish I had been

made known of the problem beforehand, when I emailed them to find out

why the game no longer worked once I moved from the original iPad to

the iPad 3, they helped me get my game transferred and even sent a

followup email later to make sure that it was all working.

The bottom line is that it's my opinion that the outcry is mainly due

to GI fixing the glitches that certain people used to endlessly

exploit. I used to exploit multi-gifting moderately myself, but hey,

they caught on, fair game, and now it's gone. If people had just used

it reasonably, GI probably would never have had to step in to fix it.

The rationalizations at mmuff.com for why people did it, or why they

should petition GI to bring it back, rather than address the real

problems mentioned above, are comical and ridiculous.

Feel free to get back if you have any questions, or to use any of the

above (just not my name, username, email, etc.) if you want to add

some more balance to the article."

Here is my response that is awaiting approval.

I want to say that the person who wrote you the letter you posted in your comment was off base about several things. First, banning of players. I only know of 1 player that was banned and this has nothing to do with our strike. The other thing that has nothing to do with the strike is number of diamonds accumulated. We are not complaining we don't have enough diamonds, no one said this. The price for paying for diamonds is unreasonable, BUT WE DON'T HAVE TO BUY THEM. We also never asked for multigifting back, we would simply like to be able to give more than 10 collection gifts a day since the achievement in the game is to add 500 friends. That is about 1 gift every 6 weeks to each of my friends. The game is setup as a social game for us to help each other and now it is very hard to do this. Even dropping the counter with coins would be fine. We are NOT asking this company to stop charging, we just want fair gameplay back. If they were able to make millions with the way the game was, why change core aspects (like adding friends with codes) of the game. We are fully aware this is a business and pledge that once they JUST SPEAK TO US AND LISTEN, we will restore their ratings. We aren't asking for much, but are tired of being completely ignored by their customer service. I am glad the person that emailed you was able to get a response because many of us wait for weeks without a reply.

I know, the code thing is really getting on my wick!! It's ridiculous cos it looks to gi like a percentage of people are satisfied so they won't bother doing anything. Also aren't they all Facebook players? Yet posting on our iPad fb page? Someone in authority that runs the page should tell the to post on their own page or start a code post thread and anyone who randomly distracts the posts with codes should get deleted, not us who are just sounding in with advice that may help gi. Does anyone know if lorias has heard back from gi at all? They seemed to be liaising mostly with her. I still swear their poll is rigged, I've tried eight times to vote and It's not once registered my yes. Hit no just to test it and what a surprise, it stuck! A flagrant attempt to distract us all which I think is bloody unfair to the people who took time out of their day to commit to merging the info and to two cancelled agreed skypes. Some posts on fb have been absolutely ridiculous the ones saying 'there's nothing wrong with mine so leave gi alone' blah blah, ok so yeah we know a percentage of people are unaffected, but that is minor in numbers and if you don't have a problem why the frig bother to write in a thread where we are all being asked to list our troubles or suggestions. Not helpful. Grrrr rant over. Lol

Lorias is really sick. I got a pm from her yesterday and she said she was going to the hospital but would be back to us as soon as she could. She didn't mention any contact from GI so I am guessing she has still heard nothing.

Omg, I'm disgusted at the content and sway on the email that was sent!! There's pretty much nothing relevant to it. I couldn't give a stuff about multi gifting, it shouldn't have been posted on public forums then they wouldn't have seen it etc etc but all we want is to gift a reasonable ratio of stuff we have earned, yes we bloody have earned it, they are our items! To share with friends. Totally right Hun, having huge amounts of friends and being able to send less than five percent of them a gift they need is what I want fixed. Personally I was never any good at multi sending, net too fast but I feel terrible owing someone a trade cos of waiting for reset or for not being able to give a good friend something from their wish list because I've helped a lower level new friend with something. Having to pick and choose my 'best friends' is my gripe. Another Inaccurracy with diamonds. I wasn't forced to buy, I did so because I was fed up that my energy took so long to go up, I liked buying them at wknds when I get a chest so I've got tokens or collection items, makes life easier. Man that mail is way off what started it off and good on you for getting them to add other viewpoints. I don't want diamonds back for adding friends, I couldn't be bothered PERSONALLY with adding people for diamonds continuously in the evenings, I did it once and the code already used message irritated me so I just bought diamonds, but plenty of people did use it to add diamonds and good on them, all most people want back, even the die hard synthesiser users, is to be able to add who they choose, reward or no reward, but not jus the four players it offers on the first page of the services tab. What I want more than any of the irritating factors leading to striking and writing to media being fixed, is to be acknowledged, by gi, as a collective, that our views are important and our fandom appreciated. Can you imagine any global superstar like, let's say, lady gaga, being where she is now if after her first album and tour when fans contacted her she ignored or dismissed them as an irritation?? No is the answer. People and things get big because a collective of people put them there. Take away the appreciation and gratefulness and celebrating WITH the people who got you there, and you're stuffed, thats what starts backlash, not just the problems in game, but the fact we are not an appreciated factor into their success story. You can put gi up there in top ratings, but you can just as easy take them down, and we've proved it. Comminucating is their key or downfall here!Author of kristis attached thing is trying to help but for me, doesn't.

Im ss to hear she's poorly, she's been trying so much this week to make headway and like you say, I'm sure this has been contributory. Sending hugs from us all lori and big thanks for what you've been doing and hoping you feel so much better soon. I said email in my last post, was referring to the message from player the chappie got. Phew off to get a glass of juice now, I went off on one there lol. Kristi you've been doing s bang up job with this honey. In fact, the atmosphere no matter how tawdry and sucky with our game issues, is buzzing with enthusiasm and team spirit so this has done good for us all in some ways, mini silver linings. Thank you new friends, I think you're all great xxx

Were you going to put it somewhere else krist? If so it covers more bases, I don't know what happened with brads but I can't sign it, did you try? It's closed to me. If it is to you too, let me know when you post yours and I'll jump in to sign xxx

It wouldn't let me sign either, it said the time had expired. I think adding duplicate petitions would be counter productive. My letter was a lot more washed down to be understood by non-gamers. I want to make sure that this doesnt sound like I have anything against this letter because I think it is VERY well written and does a GREAT job addressing GI!!! I am 100% on board with this letter going to GI, just not sure we will recieve any signatures outside the MM community. Not that it matters if non-gamers sign even a little. So all in all I greatly appreciate all the effort that went into starting this! Thanks everyone!

Chickenchick111 wrote:I know, the code thing is really getting on my wick!! It's ridiculous cos it looks to gi like a percentage of people are satisfied so they won't bother doing anything. Also aren't they all Facebook players? Yet posting on our iPad fb page? Someone in authority that runs the page should tell the to post on their own page or start a code post thread and anyone who randomly distracts the posts with codes should get deleted, not us who are just sounding in with advice that may help gi.

It's my first time posting - but I have been reading this forum for a while. Just wanted to say that I play both FB and iPad versions of MM and the FB version does not require codes to add people - your neighbours are just your regular FB friends who happen to have MM installed. So the code adders must be ipad or even Android players. I do agree though - it is annoying when they post their codes in the middle of the conversation - where have they been LOL - codes don't work anyway

Thanks for this forum and I'm impressed with what is being done here. I love the game but have had enough of the glitches/greed/bs etc too.

"The biggest issue seems to be that, as an unfortunate side-effect of a recent update we've made to the game to keep it current with new and existing mobile game standards, Mystery Manor no longer supports gifting in-game items and currency through friend codes."

This is NOT true because the problem was with the lack of the ability to add friends with or WITHOUT bonus. Also "unfortunate side-effect" like it wasn't planned. COME ON WE ARE NOT STUPID. I was finally done being mad this morning, but now I am all fired up again. I will give you passionate and vocal

Next, she said "For the time being, these issues are exclusive to the iPad version, yes." So does this mean they will make these changes to the other versions too?

Last edited by Kristi927 on Fri Aug 17, 2012 7:13 pm; edited 1 time in total